Towards building a trustworthy pipeline integrating Neuroscience Gateway and Open Science Chain.

When the scientific dataset evolves or is reused in workflows creating derived datasets, the integrity of the dataset with its metadata information, including provenance, needs to be securely preserved while providing assurances that they are not accidentally or maliciously altered during the process. Providing a secure method to efficiently share and verify the data as well as metadata is essential for the reuse of the scientific data. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Open Science Chain (OSC) utilizes consortium blockchain to provide a cyberinfrastructure solution to maintain integrity of the provenance metadata for published datasets and provides a way to perform independent verification of the dataset while promoting reuse and reproducibility. The NSF- and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) provides a freely available web portal that allows neuroscience researchers to execute computational data analysis pipeline on high performance computing resources. Combined, the OSC and NSG platforms form an efficient, integrated framework to automatically and securely preserve and verify the integrity of the artifacts used in research workflows while using the NSG platform. This paper presents the results of the first study that integrates OSC-NSG frameworks to track the provenance of neurophysiological signal data analysis to study brain network dynamics using the Neuro-Integrative Connectivity tool, which is deployed in the NSG platform. Database URL: https://www.opensciencechain.org.

Oxidative stress indices in the erythrocytes from lactating cows after treatment for subclinical ketosis with antioxidant incorporated in the therapeutic regime.

The present investigation was carried out to assess the erythrocytic oxidative stress indices such as lipid peroxides level and activities of antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase and catalase, and some hematological parameters after treatment of subclinically ketotic lactating cows with antioxidants, vitamin E and selenium, incorporated in conventional treatment regimen. The study was carried out using lactating cows reared in small dairy herds in and around Bhubaneswar. Out of 250 urine samples examined, 42 cows were diagnosed positive for subclinical ketosis with an overall incidence of 16.8%. Blood samples were collected on day 0 (before treatment) and treatment was initiated on day 1 and the second sampling was carried out on day 7. The hematological parameters improved significantly following treatment as compared to pre-treatment level (day 0). A significant (P < 0.05) improvement was observed on day 7 with respect to hemoglobin level (8.66 +/- 0.23 vs. 9.12 +/- 0.14 gm/dl) and packed cell volume (29.7 +/- 0.56 vs. 31.1 +/- 0.50%) in the group given routine treatment along with antioxidants. The comparison of mean lipid peroxides level before (day 0) and after treatment (day 7) revealed a significant difference in group I (routine treatment, P < 0.05) and group II (routine treatment plus antioxidants, P < 0.01). The maximum reduction in SOD activity was recorded in group II animals after treatment with conventional regimes along with supplemented antioxidants (1.29 +/- 0.08 against 1.89 +/- 0.15 units/ mg of Hb, P < 0.01). The mean value of SOD activity recorded in group III animals kept as non-treated positive control (PC) on day 7 (2.59 +/- 0.14 units/mg of Hb) was significantly (P < 0.05) higher than the mean level recorded on day 0 (1.91 +/- 0.31 units/mg of Hb). An almost similar trend was observed in erythrocytic catalase activity where there was a significant (P < 0.05) reduction in catalase activity in the group II (RT+A) but there was no significant increase in catalase activity in non-treated positive control (PC) animals.